Archives for October, 2017

What better way to say farewell than with a slew of costume pictures from this year’s (coming) Halloween? Goodbye, Scienceblogs, it’s been an incredible almost-decade. Hope to see you all in all our other endeavors!

“Delay is the deadliest form of denial.” -C. Northcote Parkinson Every massless particle and wave travels at the speed of light when it moves through a vacuum. Over a distance of 130 million light years, the gamma rays and gravitational waves emitted by merging neutron stars arrived offset by a mere 1.7 seconds, an incredible…

“On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays?” –Victor Francis Hess It’s often said that advanced in physics aren’t met with “eureka!” but rather with “that’s funny,” but the truth is even stranger sometimes. Rather than the scientific method of:…

“I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.” –Albert Schweitzer Every so often, the argument comes up that science is expendable. That we’re simply investing too much of our resources — too much public money — into an endeavor with no short-term benefits. Meanwhile, there’s suffering of all kinds, from poverty…

“Dark matter is interesting. Basically, the Universe is heavier than it should be. There’s whole swathes of stuff we can’t account for.” -Talulah Riley One of the most puzzling facts about the Universe is that 95% of the energy in it, in the forms of dark matter and dark energy, are completely invisible, and have…

“I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.” -Richard Feynman Scientists have long had a reputation for being uptight, serious, and even killjoy personalities. But 50+ years ago, Richard Feynman was forcing everyone who felt that way to challenge their assumptions. With his brash attitude…

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” -Federico García Lorca In an episode filled with Vulcan mindmelds, Klingon treachery, a spectacular nebula, themes of racial purity, and PTSD, you’d think all the ingredients were there for a spectacular episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Instead,…

“You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.” -Cassandra Clare Well, the cat’s out of the bag. A little over a week ago, Scienceblogs announced to us writers that they no longer had the funds to keep the site operational, and so they would be shutting down. They asked us to…

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.” -Thomas S. Kuhn For all of human history, the biggest questions have fascinated us. Where did the Universe come from? How old is it? And what…

“O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations…